The 1967 Game: Who’s Timothy Leary Now?

I have a confession to make.

When there is bad news I try to avoid it.

I turn off the TV. I avoid the paper. And I look somewhere else. To sport. To entertainment. To my family. To you.

One hallmark of a Generational Crisis is that this stops working. During a crisis there is no place to hide from the bad news. It may surround you on the street, as in the late 1850s. It may growl in your stomach, or in the sad eyes of your children, as in the early 1930s.

In the late 1960s, it invaded the TV and radio — the pictures from Vietnam, the hippies, and riots, the rock music — all had a profound impact on the Greatest Generation. It re-set their assumptions, and it focused the anger of a lifetime on the culture.

Something like that is happening right now. We have built our hideouts on celebrity culture, on sports and entertainment, but there is no place to hide from the horrors:

• Baseball?
• Football?
• Basketball?
• Bicycling?
• Movie stars?

This, of course, in addition to the daily horrors on the TV. This in addition to the war our best are being lost in, the falling knife and overwhelming worry of real estate, the bizarre weather. And our leaders are not just powerless to act, they’re piling on.

This is the kind of hammering needed to create a complete change of
mind within the majority of people.

A generation ago, I remember people
I never would have imagined, graduates of the G.I. Bill, with FHA
mortgages and solid Social Security accounts, talking seriously about
how George Wallace was right, and not just about race, but about
everything. Government was the problem, it meddled, it let the kids run
riot, it made no sense.

This change of mind proved permanent. Men and women who a few years
before had stood with JFK and LBJ would vote for Nixon, Reagan and Bush
for the rest of their lives, would contribute to the cause via direct
mail, and would adjust their personal habits to avoid "the left" in all
its Technicolor horror. The left became the culture, the right the counter-culture, and it was that culture, the culture of talk radio, of the megachurch and the TV evangelist, which won.

The same sort of reversal is happening now among baby boomers. People in their 30s, 40s and 50s,
raised on the heroism of Ronald Reagan and the Gulf War, convinced a
decade ago that Bill Clinton was evil, Al Gore crazy and Taxachusetts
profoundly un-American, are now contributing to Democrats. They are
echoing Democratic themes, not just on the war but on other issues.
They are changing their minds.

And their minds won’t change again. Ever. For the rest of their
lives. They will teach their children that these were evil times, that
we let ourselves be led by evil men, that government must be watched
but also supported. And those children will grow up believing them,
mostly, gaining new habits of thought.

That’s why I believe that the enduring values of openness, transparency and consensus,
the values these kids see, in action, online every day, in all the
positive interactions they have with this medium, are what we need to
be thinking about, and teaching.

It’s myths and values which drive power, which make it endure for a
generation. I believe these Internet Myths and Internet Values are
being learned, on blogs, via email, through videos, as people escape
the horrible news of our time and seek out some way to explain it all.
And I don’t think Bill O’Reilly is stupid — I think he went after
DailyKos for precisely that reason.

So who’s Timothy Leary now? Who is selling us the old drugs that
won’t work, telling us to run from reality into a self-created and
self-referential hatred?

It’s BillO!